Spring, the sweet spring

Everybody knows the English only like to talk about the weather… But it’s been a funny old spring this year, mostly cold and drab, and despite global warming we had SNOW last weekend – but only a couple of days earlier it was the warmest day of the year so far, sunny shirtsleeve weather. What’s going on?

Anyway, as far as Nature is concerned, spring seems to have been mostly very slow in coming (despite daffodils appearing in the flower shops ever earlier: we never used to see them much before March, just in time for Mother’s Day, but in recent years they have been around before Christmas – flown in from the Channel Islands or somewhere – and I swear I saw some for sale in October last year. But some of the daffodils growing in gardens really are late, and are only now just coming out).

I certainly wasn’t expecting any roses yet; in England at any rate, single-flowering roses usually do their stuff in June or July. So it was a great treat to look out of my bedroom window earlier this week and see a huge display of Canary Bird, busting out all over. Now, this fella is noted for being the first rose to appear, but that would normally be in May, certainly not the second week in April.

At the moment it’s cold and dark and rainy again (good news for London Marathon runners trying to keep cool today, less good news for the onlookers). But Canary Bird tells me that spring is on its way at last – whether early or late I can’t tell.

One Comment on “Spring, the sweet spring”

The weather is wacko here too. We also had snow for two days one weekend in late April, when the previous weekend (the day I washed the car) we had a record high of 82 degrees Fahrenheit. I brushed the heavy freezing snow off the apple blossoms on our little apple tree in the back yard. I also brushed it off the tulips, which were heavily weighted down. They bounced up and danced back and forth, as if to say, “Thank you!”

Did you see the tornado damage to the southern U.S.? It’s just as predicted in Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.”